GnuCash User Manual
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# More hints

## Opening Balance

If your Quicken files have "Opening Balance" records, you will see an account called "Opening Balance" in the Accounts tab. Accounting for the source of opening balances is sort of a hassle, when you think about it, because they come from accounts that are outside the scope of the GnuCash universe. The suggestion I've seen on the gnucash-devel list is to make Opening Balances point to a GnuCash account called "Retained Earnings", of type Equity. I don't exactly understand this but it seems reasonable, and it's the default for accounts called "Opening Balance".

## Empty category

In the Categories display, you may notice a blank QIF Category entry. Quicken transactions are not required to have a Category, but GnuCash transactions are required to have a source and a destination. The blank category lets you select which GnuCash account all uncategorized transactions go to. This will generally be miscellaneous checks you have written, cash withdrawals, and so on, so you probably want to put these in a "Misc Expenses" account or something similar. It may make sense to put this in an equity account; let me know if there's a good explanation for how it should be.

## Dividend category

Quicken stock transactions have a recognizable pattern for dividend payments. If the importer can definitely tell that a transaction is a transfer from dividends then it will default to creating a "Dividend" income account. This category is usually not present in the Quicken file, so it's being manufactured out of nowhere.

## Fund families

Quicken has the abstraction of a single account representing a "fund family" for the purpose of allowing smooth transfers between the various accounts administered within the family. The GnuCash Importer will ALWAYS get this wrong the first time, because Quicken explicitly puts the wrong information in the file. The "blanket" account representing the fund family as a whole should probably be a Bank account, since the transfers to and from it in the Quicken file are denominated in currency, not shares. The balance of such an account is supposed to always be 0 since you just use it as an intermediary between two accounts in the family. Hopefully I'll fix this at some point if someone tells me how it's supposed to work.

## Brokerage accounts

Brokerage accounts are really confusing to me. Basically, my thinking is that the brokerage account itself should probably be a Bank account. The only weirdness is in stuff like dividends paid from securities to the brokerage account. If you're using a Dividend account, you can lose the information about where the dividend came from. The importer tries to save this information by putting the security name in the Payee slot (which shows up in the GnuCash Description field for the transaction). If you have a better idea, let me know.

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